This “stout with coffee added aged in bourbon barrels” pours a desolate black with a tight, brown sugar-colored head. Tweak blasts out an intensely sweet nose of chocolate syrup and black coffee, with alcohol singe and barrel wood bringing up the rear (it’s very similar to the Black Tuesday we reviewed earlier this month). The first sip is not as sweet as expected, but it packs a mighty punch – dark chocolate, coffee grounds, sawdust, vanilla, and whiskey-soaked wood chips crowd the palate, leaving an almost chile-like burn on the tongue. It’s a beer that goes directly to your dome, almost too strong for its own good, but also too big and bold and challenging to dismiss or ignore.

This imperial stout brewed with farmhouse yeast from Austin-based Jester King has been aging in our “cellar” for nearly two years, and it pours a licorice black with a marshmallow-y, toasted brown head. Rich coffee and chocolate aromas welcome you on the nose, along with wood, licorice, and a citrus smell that eventually comes to dominate; the overall effect is similar to chocolate-covered oranges. That orange-y bitterness is also present on the first swallow, as are bitter chocolate and kindling, with those richer chocolate and coffee flavors barely peeking out from the background. After aging, Black Metal is still a big, dark boozer with a light body and some intriguing bitterness, but it’s also one-note, and it was a lot better fresh.

18.9% ABVPurchased through The Bruery online shop and poured into mini tasting glasses.

This already legendary bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout from Orange County-based The Bruery pours a midnight black with a vaporous, light brown head. It smacks you with hard alcohol aromas upon the first crack of the bottle, but chocolate, coffee and wet wood notes emerge when you dial in further. An eye popper upon first swallow, with the flavors working on two different levels – throat-clearing booziness on one end of the palette, spectacularly strong and nuanced chocolate and coffee on the other. Black Tuesday is a masterful slow-sipper, and not as grossly sweet as some of The Bruery’s other big-ass brews. The beer works wonders if you take your time with it, growing a little more peppery on the aftertaste, and with vanilla bean and wood growing stronger the longer it warms.

Brewed by San Diego upstarts Saint Archer, Coffee Brown pours a black coffee color with a mid-sized, sawdust-colored head. The nose is more sweet than roasty, not unlike coffee candy, with aromas of coffee, amaretto, milk chocolate and toffee. Coffee Brown gets sweet on the first swallow as well, with a flavor that feels a little too artificial, and although it finishes with a nice coffee and cream richness, the aftertaste is a little thick and syrupy. There is some nuttiness from the brown ale base, but I would have preferred more bitterness, and a coffee flavor that was slightly more authentic. We have really enjoyed some of the hoppier offerings from Saint Archer, but this one just misses.

8.5% ABV
Purchased through the Rare Beer Club and poured into tulip glasses.

This “rum barrel aged Belgian-style ale with spices” began as a blend of two Grand Teton beers – the Bitch Creek XX Double ESB and the 2014 Coming Home quad. The resulting blend pours a rusty, date brown with a minimal off-white head, and offers a most unusual nose, an allspice and clove spice bomb set amidst classic Belgian aromas of dark fruits and toffee. Vintage 2014 is extremely tasty and distinct on the first swallow – a fascinating mix of holiday spices, toffee deserts, and Trappist yeast. There are strong spices, but they remain in perfect balance, and serve as complements to the overarching flavor of toffee apples and rum-soaked fruitcake, with orange peel especially lingering on the palette. It is similar to a hot toddy served cold, and the beer is smooth and drinkable in addition to its novel complexity.

Another year in the books, and plenty more beer in our bellies. We have had another wonderful year of beer adventures, starting in January with The Art of Beer event at McClellan, and continuing with San Francisco and Sacramento Beer Weeks, our trip to Portland, the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp, and our many daytrips and weekend voyages to San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Albany, Walnut Creek, Chico, Rocklin, Folsom, Davis, and various other points across Northern California.

More great beer is being brewed, poured, and sold in our neck of the woods than ever before, so we have had the opportunity to try a lot of amazing brews in 2014. The following is a list of the ten best beers that we tried for the first time in 2014, with an addendum list of 10 more sublime first-timers. To be fair, we have omitted some “world famous” heavy hitters, such as Marshall Zukov’s Imperial Stout from Cigar City, Hill Farmstead’s Arthur, Cherry Adam From the Wood by Hair of the Dog, and Dogfish Head’s 18% ABV Worldwide Stout. We also excluded any excellent beers that only one of us tried (e.g., Triple Voodoo King Leopold w/ coffee, and Drake’s Jolly Rodger 2014), since we are trying to build a His & Hers consensus list.

Finally, in order to spread the love around a little, we elected to only allow one beer per brewery. That posed an immense problem with San Francisco-based Cellarmaker Brewing, since they have quickly become our favorite NorCal brewery, and we have collectively sampled and loved over two dozen of their beers this year (only the coconut-heavy ABV monster Blammo! was divisive – She adored it, He found it sickly-sweet). If we are being 100% honest, we would have no issue filling this top 10 + 10 with 20 off-the-charts brilliant Cellarmaker beers. We could have gone with the smoked coffee porter Imperial Coffee and Cigarettes, the chewy oatmeal stout Walker, SoMa Ranger, the tart saison Beertender’s Breakfast, and then fill most of the rest of the list with their amazing hop experiments, such as Mo’ Nelson, No Nelson Left Behind, Highway to the Danker Zone, Dank Williams, Tiny Dankster, Spear or Culture, and Christopher Riwakan. Therefore, we have decided to name Cellarmaker our MVP Brewery of the Year – just go to Cellarmaker, find a seat, sample every beer on tap, and enjoy your new life.

Pinchy Jeek is “brewed with pumpkin and spices and aged in Wild Turkey bourbon barrels” by Anderson Valley, and it pours a black-and-tan color with a mid-sized, beach sand hand. The nose is sweet, transfixing, mysterious, and autumnal, a candied and complex aroma that boasts pumpkin pie spice, toffee, vanilla, and a hint of whiskey barrel. Spices hit the palette first, a warming glow of nutmeg, cinnamon and pumpkin, with the Wild Turkey kick and Tootsie Roll sweetness riding in on the second wave of flavor. It’s a fascinating and rewarding brew, maple sweets and savory spices in perfect harmony, and an essential beer for the fall.

We recently sat down with Johnny Flores, host of the Sacramento-focused podcast Serious Talk. Seriously., to drink a beer and record an episode of his show. The three of us shared a bottle of 3 Best Friends, a delicious coffee vanilla lager brewed by the rejuvenated Davis legends Sudwerk, and talked about beer, illustrations, how we got started here at His and Hers, our review process, and some of our favorite beers. There is also a lengthy talk about the evolution of the TV show Cheers, long a fecund subject for discussion in our household, and a brief back-and-forth about pairing beers with Panda Express. You can download the episode (#28) on iTunes here or listen on Johnny’s blog:stspodcast.com.

After months of anxiously peering through their windows during Saturday morning Old Soul runs, we finally got to check out the newly opened Oak Park Brewing Companylast weekend. It was worth the wait, and their large brewing space/bar on Broadway shows a meticulous attention to detail and design. They had six beers on tap, and while they were not serving tasters for their high-volume opening weekend, they apparently plan to offer those moving forward. The Rower’s RyePA was the standout among the beers we sampled, a bitter and complex brew that showed off the rye as much as the hops. There is an immense indoor dining area – they offer dining and catering services as well as beer – but the sweetest plum is a spacious outdoor patio roofed with interlacing lights. There is a lot of activity and development on this stretch of Broadway, and Oak Park Brewing Company has the potential to be a hub of the scene.